Re: Who uses Octave?

From:

John W. Eaton

Subject:

Re: Who uses Octave?

Date:

Tue, 7 Feb 2012 09:34:44 -0500

On 7-Feb-2012, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:
| On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Michael Goffioul
| <address@hidden> wrote:
| > On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Julien Salort <address@hidden> wrote:
| >> Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> writes:
| >>
| >>>> - Hardware I/O: I'm not sure how easy it it to talk to simple analog and
| >>>> digital I/O cards but
| >>>> haven't heard a lot of success stories yet. The main OS of my students is
| >>>> Windows, other OS are <
| >>>> 10% I would guess.
| >>>
| >>> This has been mentioned a couple of times before. The main problem
| >>> there seems to be the cross-platform issue.
| >>
| >> I use Octave in my daily work to communitate with several NI devices
| >> (GPIB card, DAQmx card) using NI-VISA and NI-DAQmx libraries. I've been
| >> running my code on Mac OS X, Windows and now Linux. It is
| >> cross-platform, as long as National Instruments provides libraries for
| >> your preferred platform: no problem on Windows, almost no problem on
| >> Macintosh, tricky on Linux, except if you stick to the supported
| >> distributions (I had it work with Scientific Linux 6.1 but failed on
| >> Debian Squeeze).
| >>
| >> I'd be willing to publish my code. I'm just not sure if there is a legal
| >> issue: as I understand it, a GPL program is distributed in binary and
| >> source forms. However, if you link against a proprietary library, the
| >> resulting binary cannot be distributed with a GPL license. Am I right ?
| >>
| >> Then my problem is the following:
| >> - I have no problem to publish the source code of my oct files
| >> - Once compiled, they link against Octave libraries (GPL) and National
| >> Instruments libraries (proprietary).
| >>
| >> What license should I choose ?
| >
| > Your source code must use a GPLv3-compatible license. Because it is
| > intended to be linked against NI library, which is not
| > GPLv3-compatible, you can't distribute resulting binaries. OTOH
| > nothing prevents you from distributing sources only.
| >
| > But as a GPL project, we obviously prefer a fully GPL-compatible
| > solution, if there's any. Also you code could not be hosted on
| > octave-forge, as we recently decided to host only GPL-compatible
| > packages, so you'd have to host your code somewhere else.
| >
| > Michael.
| > _______________________________________________
| > Help-octave mailing list
| > address@hidden
| > https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/listinfo/help-octave
|
| I think you can distribute your code under GPLv3, by removing all
| content that is not GPL compatible and provide a nice help file
| explaining how to use it and compile it (you can even distribute make
| files).
I think we all understand that the GPL clearly forbids distributing the
resulting binaries.
If your intent is to attempt to avoid the terms of the GPL simply by
releasing a thin wrapper between Octave and a proprietary library,
then it is possible that this is still a GPL violation, regardless of
how the thin wrapper and the proprietary library are distributed. See
section 5(c) of GPLv3.
You may think you are helping people by releasing this code, but I
would urge to you not do it and instead work to provide free software
drivers for the hardware.
jwe